Tag: sj

The Dilemma Of Creative Placemaking

The question of just how to execute creative placemaking without inviting gentrification sits at the forefront of creative placemaking circles. Jamie Hand, a researcher for ArtPlace America, says the friction between placemaking’s benefits and the onrush of gentrifying forces has happened frequently enough to spark vigorous discussion and dialogue on the efforts to walk a tightrope between uplift and displacement of the community. – NextCity

No More All-Male Comedy-Writing Teams, Declares UK TV Network

“ITV will no longer commission comedy shows with all-male writers’ rooms, the broadcaster’s head of comedy has said. Saskia Schuster said she realised last year that ‘an awful lot of my comedy entertainment shows are made up of all-male writing teams. … Too often the writing room is not sensitively run. It can be aggressive and slightly bullying.'” – BBC

Choreography As Conflict Resolution — A Retired Dancer Becomes A Professional Mediator

Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe’s wife and a former member of his company, Ballett Frankfurt, “develops choreographic methods that let groups address differences in nonverbal ways. Many of her projects center on participatory ‘action dialogues,’ which allow groups as large as 250 to tackle fraught issues like racism and polarization.” – Dance Magazine

Redefining London Culturally

“More of us than ever consider ourselves culturally engaged, and we are now expanding the definition of culture “possibly to the point of extinction”. ‘Big c’ and ‘small c’ culture now intermix with a day-to-day theatricality that we all welcome, and the stage for this activity is places, from small community-owned plots to large brownfield regeneration sites, where these elements can be brought together in ways that benefit a range of communities and tell great stories.” – Arts Professional

Mexican Government Calls Out Fashion Designer For Cultural Appropriation, Calls For U.N. Involvement (?!)

Alejandra Frausto, Mexico’s secretary for culture, wrote an official letter to designer Carolina Herrera and her creative director, Wes Gordon, about a recent Herrera collection that Frausto described as “plagiarism”: “This is a matter of ethical consideration that obliges us to speak out and bring an urgent issue to the UN’s sustainable development agenda: promoting inclusion and making those who are invisible visible.” – The Daily Beast

By The Numbers: Picture Books In 2018 Were Less Diverse

Male characters continue to dominate the most popular picture books: a child is 1.6 times more likely to read one with a male rather than a female lead, and seven times more likely to read a story that has a male villain in it than a female baddie. Male characters outnumbered female characters in more than half the books, while females outnumber males less than a fifth of the time. – The Guardian

My Right To Speak On Campus

“Debates over free speech on campus are not about formal rights but rather about what we might call real freedom. We have the formal right to speak freely on a given topic whenever there is no law preventing our doing so. But those who claim to have been silenced by political correctness typically have the legal right to say whatever it is they claim they cannot say. What they are really objecting to is the social pressure not to make use of that formal freedom — a pressure that, they argue, reduces their real freedom to express themselves.” – Chronicle of Higher Education